I was in Washington, DC the weekend of the first presidential debate and the beginning of the Great Bail-out of 2008.  I was there to promote a book, but it was impossible to ignore the tension in the city tasked with saving Americans from themselves.

The friends with whom I was staying had to go in to work that Saturday, so I combed Eastern Market by myself, a fly on the wall listening in to people's conversations.  Everyone was worried. Nobody knew what would happen. 

While money doesn't buy happiness, it sure can buy security. Being able to get a mortgage loan for you or college loans for your kids knocks one item off the mighty list of Things that Cause Stress.

As we've turned over and over the financial mess we're in, the inevitable blame sets in.  Banks are at fault for predatory lending.  Homeowners are at fault for buying homes they couldn't afford.  Consumers are at fault for racking up too much credit card debt (even though W. regularly preached since 2001 that the patriotic thing to do is spend money).  We knew deep down inside we'd stopped operating on a cash-and-layaway basis and started charging pretty much anything we couldn't afford -- even groceries -- starting in the early '90s when credit card companies gave away t-shirts and M&Ms to hook naive college students for the first time.

My husband and I never carried a credit card balance until we bought This Old House (our former, 85-year-old house in Kansas City) and proceeded to get hit with replacing every major appliance as it blew up, shut down or leaked into a ceiling. By the time my daughter came along four years ago needing car seats and cribs and daycare and 100,000 diapers, we were resigned to signing over our discretionary income to cash-only Costco every month and charging the car trouble when it popped up.

Just as we were rectifying young babyhood's plastic purchases, we moved to get our daughter into a better school district.  Which should've been great, only This Old House needed electrical upgrades and termite treatments and new paint in order to be sold, and Chateau Travolta, our new bank foreclosure, lost its air conditioner for a cool $3,000 one month after we moved in. 

And that's how we, fairly responsible people, ended up pretty far in this time last year.  Are we the problem?

Moving or attempting to sell a house does a lot of families in. Naturally Optimistic writes:

Watching the news today does not make me feel very good. I am hoping & praying (to God AND St. Joseph) that the woman who bought our house - well, that her loan actually goes through. I have no idea if it's in jeopardy or if it's even an issue - but it still makes me worried. I just can't imagine holding on to two mortgages for more than this one month. If we do it'll be a very very tight Christmas, to say the least.

But at least there's this site with pictures of houses for sale that are uglier than yours. Sorry - totally off-topic, but I thought you might need some comic relief on this subject.

Adding children can result in not only diapers, but unexpected hospital expenses: (Ed. Note: these numbers even seem low to me, but I couldn't find exact figures for 2008.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005 45.8 million Americans do not have health insurance. If this figure includes you, you can anticipate an average hospital bill of $5,000-$10,000 for a vaginal delivery. Add at least $2,000 if you need a c-section. These figures do not include the medical costs associated with nine months of prenatal visits, ultrasound costs and other lab costs.

The quest to have children, which is rarely covered by insurance and costs thousands (whether biological or via adoption) also takes its toll.  Expectant Danielle, who's trying to adopt, writes:

Part of me wants to just throw caution to the wind and just get a baby any way possible, the other part thinks that maybe we should just be conservative and plan for the worse (sic).

Are these the irresponsible Americans we hear so much about? The greedy consumers who have acted so foolishly? How did we get into this mess?  I contend we've just been trying to seize the American dream:  home ownership and family. We aren't so different from the generations before us. So what happened?